Drawn in by the enigma

THE University of Sydney Art Gallery is showing, for the first time, a fine smaller collection of works.

Untitled (historical scene), 18th century, artist unknown. From the exhibition Fugitive images, University of Sydney Art Gallery to August 30.

THERE are people who think in a methodical way, and others in a rapid and intuitive manner; Blaise Pascal, a mathematical prodigy but also a supreme example of intuitive insight, called the first the esprit de geometrie and the second the esprit de finesse. And then there are people, like bureaucrats or educationalists, who do not so much think in terms of mechanically assembled words that may once have been living ideas but are now little more than inert signifiers. The most characteristic expression of the educationalist’s mind is found in tabulations of aims, objectives, standards and other such notions in impressively symmetrical rows and columns, as though inherently woolly thinking could be carded into lucidity by disposition in a grid.

In more extended documents, like the current draft national curriculum for visual art, we encounter the same kind of thing on a larger scale: intellectually flabby and administratively prescriptive, with vacuous formulas repeated from page to page by the cut-and-paste method, this turgid document seems to have been drafted by a committee with no understanding of the practice, history or theory of art.

The contrast with the British national curriculum for art, which is concise and well conceived, is more than striking — it is frankly shocking. It shows up not only the lamentable intellectual quality of our document but the manifestly flawed theoretical and methodological assumptions that lie behind the way it was commissioned, planned and drafted.

Among other things, our draft curriculum contains no coherent discussion of art history, and this of course reflects the fact that most art teachers trained in recent years have no knowledge of the subject. Even more disturbing is that the curriculum gives virtually no guidance on the acquisition of any techniques or skills by which experience might be pictured, meaning made, ideas and feelings expressed. Drawing is barely touched on, while there are numerous vague references to manipulating images. There seems to be little realisation that just as you can’t get far in music without taking the trouble to learn an instrument, you can’t express much in art without learning very specific and demanding techniques in drawing, painting, photography, printmaking or ceramics.

Of all these techniques, drawing has rightly been considered the first, both as a propaedeutic to the others and as an enduring foundation. Drawing can take many forms, from imaginative improvisation to strict rendering of complex objective motifs, and for the mature artist it is a vehicle through which ideas can be developed, planned and put into execution.

Little children draw spontaneously and often with delightful inventiveness, but even at this stage their imagination can be stimulated by looking at appropriate models and by being asked to render particular subjects. As they reach later childhood and adolescence, their natural inspiration tends to be overwhelmed by the kitsch formulas they encounter in books, magazines and advertising, and copy from other children. The age of innocence is over and all they will produce thereafter, without guidance, is increasingly ugly doodles.

This is when they need to be taught to draw systematically, which ultimately means to look outside themselves, to become conscious of a reality that exists independently of the mind. The ultimate pedagogic value of drawing lies not only in the acquisition of manual and intellectual skills, but in an opening of awareness beyond sterile narcissistic introversion and the discovery of a world beyond the ego.

Those who are sceptical about the value of drawing tend to think of it as a straightforward copy of objective appearances. But in fact there is no such thing: anyone who has seriously attempted drawing will know that there is nothing more mysterious and ineffable than the world of visual experience. The artist is constantly faced with choices, with decisions about priority and significance, selection and composition, so that no two drawings will be identical.

Perhaps most profoundly, drawing a motif of any complexity is a kind of voyage of exploration. There are things you can’t see until you begin to think about translating what is before you into graphic form, and there are other things that only become apparent as it were in the mirror of the drawing you have made: a compositional weakness in the sketch, for example, reveals forms overlooked in the subject.

There can be an extraordinary intimacy in a drawing, telling us as much about the sensibility and mind of the author, and more broadly the mind of the time, as about the subject, and that is why drawings have been so avidly collected since the Renaissance. And while there are a number of masterpieces of drawing in the Prado exhibition in Melbourne reviewed a fortnight ago, there is also, at the University of Sydney Art Gallery, a fine smaller collection of works left to the university by the late judge Roddy Meagher, now shown for the first time and accompanied by an outstanding scholarly catalogue by Georgina Cole.

The exhibition is diverse in its range of work from over three centuries or so, but aptly begins with a couple of very delicate little drawings by Stefano della Bella (1610-64). The first is so finely drawn that it requires sharp eyes to see that the little head of a man is animated by two arms that reach out in front. The second drawing is a bearded head, made from an antique statue of the river god type, but recalling Rubens in the way the stone figure is reconverted into the semblance of a living face.

Here we see immediately two different uses of drawing in the work process of an artist — the first perhaps capturing the gesture of a real man seen in a public place, in the way that Leonardo recommended — which would not be surprising, as Cole points out that the artist taught himself to paint using Leonardo’s then unpublished Trattato — the second using an antique source as inspiration for painted figure.

It is particularly the lightness and economy of line that make these two little works so exemplary; for contrary to the modern fallacy that the conventions and formulas of a learnt visual language impede spontaneity of vision or expression, here we can see how the mastery of a formal language allows for the free and rapid notation of phenomena. And the same almost calligraphic marks that so fluently describe the brow, the eye and the cheekbone in the sculptural head also permit the artist to capture the fleeting appearance of an action caught in the flow and motion of real life.

There is an equally interesting comparison between two 18th-century landscape drawings, one by Jean-Baptiste Pillement (1728-1808) and the other attributed to Gainsborough — attribution in drawing is even harder than in paintings, as the former are rarely signed and frequently miscatalogued, or hopefully ascribed to more prestigious authors.

In this case, each drawing is based on the observation of nature, but the second more directly than the first. Pillement has no doubt seen something like this tree and this rock, but here they are subordinated to a rococo sense of design and turned into a sort of compositional module ready to be incorporated into a painting or print. The drawing attributed to Gainsborough, executed in pencil, is far quicker and more summary in its notation of natural phenomena as actually seen; the foreground trees are barely marked in, for what has seized the artist’s attention is the way that the mid­ground trees, perhaps backlit, form a fringe of dark silhouettes against the illuminated mass of the mountain behind.

Each drawing in a collection like this poses its own problems, some of which will be almost impossible to solve since many of the artists are unfamiliar and even anonymous; but part of the pleasure of such works is precisely in detecting clues that may bring us closer to a solution. There is a lively but rather confused Flagellation of Christ, for example, which must have been done after 1607, for the figure of the man on the right is inspired by Caravaggio’s Flagellation of that year in Naples, but the confused jumble of ill-proportioned figures shows that he was a ­belated mannerist.

Another unattributed sheet, of a kneeling figure in black and red chalk, recalls Simon Vouet’s bulky draperies. Vouet was a French painter prominent in Rome before his return to Paris in 1627 to become the leading artist there for most of the next two decades. Perhaps this drawing is by a member of his studio? It could almost be a study for Gabriel in an Annunciation but for the downcast head, while the right hand seems to be holding something between thumb and forefinger rather than being extended in greeting: it could be one of the Apostles surrounding the empty tomb in an Assumption of the Virgin. There is even some general affinity with the figure on the right of Vouet’s Assumption (1644-49) in the Musee des Beaux-Arts of Reims.

As for the probably French 18th-century ink and wash drawing of a complex history subject that has been attributed both to Greuze and to Fragonard, neither particularly convincingly, could the subject perhaps be Hecuba with her daughter Polyxena, about to be led away to be sacrificed, while the body of her last son, Poly­dorus, lies in the foreground? The fact that the young woman reaches up to the older woman’s arm seems more a gesture of affection than one of resisting aggression. Here at least, certain clues suggest a subject from history or ­mythology.

Here again, as throughout this small but diverse exhibition, we are struck by the myriad uses of drawing as the endlessly various tool with which the artist analyses appearance, invents ideas and constructs compositions. And we are reminded why it has so long been considered the indispensable basis of all art teaching.

Fugitive images

University of Sydney Art Gallery to August 30